Yves here. Trump’s ongoing policy whipsaws and “flood the zone” approach has served its intended aim of keeping all eyes on him. That means that our collective existential crisis of global warming is not getting remotely the attention it warrants. That of course suits business leaders and the wealthy, who are so short-sighted that preserving their power status and lifestyles are more important than leading by example, making sacrifices and implementing major changes in their realms of authority.
If you’ve been paying attention, it is not hard to miss that our soi-disant elites are making a collective shrug. Global warming is just too hard, so carry on with environmental destruction for fun and profit.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Last December we featured a piece, “Near-Term Climate News and Other Tall Tales,” which included the following chart. The source is James Hansen’s December 2025 climate letter, available here. I’ve highlighted in red two areas of special interest.
First, note the meaning of the lime-green and lavender lines. The lime-green line projects future global warming using the best linear fit of climate data from the years 1970-2010. That rate is +0.18°C per decade.
Yet, as the data above shows, the real rate of global warming is not constant at all; there’s a clear rise in measured temperature starting in 2015. Climate change has accelerated.
With that in mind, consider the lavender line. It projects future warming using the best linear fit of data from 2010 to 2024. That rate is +0.31°C per decade, almost double the earlier rate.
Now look to the extreme right of the graph, where the lavender line crosses the vertical for the year 2040 (the X-axis is time). Based on this projection, global warming will cross above +1.8°C in 2040 and cross above two-degrees warming in the mid-2050s.
A disaster to be sure, but 25 years away, so it’s easy for the comfortable to think there’s still time to act, still time to enjoy March Madness for a few more years untroubled by troubling thoughts.
Not So Fast, My Friend
It’s now February, just two short months since then, and new data has come in regarding the next El Niño. Hansen on that:
Another El Nino Already? What Can We Learn from It?
Abstract. The world seems headed into another El Nino, just 3 years after the last one. Such quick return normally would imply, at most, an El Nino of moderate strength, but we suggest that even a moderately strong El Nino may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027. The extreme warming will be a result mainly of high climate sensitivity and a recent increase of the net global climate forcing, not the result of an exceptional El Nino, per se. We find that the principal drive for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.
His accompanying chart shows this updated data (again, highlights are mine):
Three things to note:
First, on the left there’s a third line (in purple) showing the climate change rate from 2015 in addition to the earlier lines. The new rate is 0.41°C per decade, more than double the rate from 1970-2010.
Second, note on the line showing the 12-month running mean of global temperature (in blue), the most recent La Niña minimum. That’s a projection, since 12 months have not passed. But if the La Niña minimum is the number above, it — the minimum of the El Niño-La Niña cycle — will be higher than any previous El Niño maximum.
If this turns out to be true — that the next minimum is higher than any previous maximum — it will confirm the accuracy of the higher projected acceleration.
Hansen again:
Two years ago, when many doubted the reality of global warming acceleration, we noted that the peak of the ongoing El Nino and the following La Nina valley could help confirm the reality of acceleration and assess whether average global temperature has already reached 1.5°C. The La Nina valley is yet to be determined, as the 12-month mean is still declining. We projected a minimum of 1.4°C to be achieved by the second quarter of 2026. A minimum about 1.4°C will be strong support of global temperature acceleration, as such La Nina minimum is higher than any El Nino maximum in the prior decade, which included a “Super El Nino.” In turn, it supports the mechanisms that we suggest are behind acceleration: high climate sensitivity (at least 4°C for doubled CO2) and reduction of aerosol cooling due to declining aerosol emissions from East Asia and ships at sea (Global warming in the pipeline, and Global warming has accelerated).
I am confident he’s right about the next La Niña minimum. To my knowledge, no scientist has predicted too much warming; for decades, every projection has been for too little. Those conservative estimates are what keep us watching the game instead of pummeling politicians.
Finally, look what happens to the warming projection as it reaches the top. It crosses +2.0°C in the 2030s, not in the 2050s. That’s clearly not later. That’s very close to now.
The real bottom line of this piece is immediately above — two-degrees warming is likely just ahead. And now that ideologues have replaced the corporatists, we’re about to race to the end at break-neck speed.
So what should we do? Regular readers know I’m no doom-and-gloomer. The world needn’t control how you feel. We all try to live well, even in the face of our death. That doesn’t make life mean nothing — if anything, it makes life matter more. What we do until then can still bring pleasure and joy. As with that, so here.
In addition, each day we plan for bad things to come. So what should you do with this news? Have trust in yourself. Plan. Prepare to adapt. And live your life well regardless of circumstance. That task hasn’t changed.
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I’m not quite sure why it is assumed that the oligarchs stick to fossil fuels because it is profitable to do so. If the last 6 years have taught us anything, it is that they can create markets for whatever products they choose (effective or not). They control the policy and the politicians (see the covid response and the Epstein files).
I’d argue that people have turned off to the fear of climate change, so most political capital has already been squeezed out of it. You might even call it “climate change fatigue”.
*Sigh*
It’s not the same oligarchs. They are not monolithic, save for their love of private jet travel.
OK, so which oligarchs are responsible?
You have asked to make yourself an object lesson by persisting in demonstrating that you are either deficient in the ability to take hints, exercise critical thinking skills, or just a garden variety troll.
If you are not observant enough to recognize that our top wealthy are factionalized, as I pointed out, and therefore have different and regularly conflicting economic interests, you don’t belong here.
Formally, you violated our Policies, to which you agreed as a condition of commenting, by making an assignment.
I trust you will find your happiness on the Internet elsewhere.
Yves,
You make an important point, and it’s one that’s missed by many: most oligarchs do not draw attention to themselves– the attention-seeking Musks, Gates, and a handful of others, are rare exceptions, drawing attention to themselves, as others prefer to work in the shadows, behind the stage, and often in secrecy.
As you stated, oligarchs are not of one mind, but they do share common interests:
Billionaires have a vast array of social and political interests that often pull in opposite directions. Some believe in climate change and reproductive rights, others fund climate disinformation and are anti-choice. Some build up an impressive philanthropic portfolio; others have no desire to donate to political or social causes. Some want to own a professional sports team and others are exploring space travel.
But there is one interest the ultra-wealthy coalesce around…
https://inequality.org/article/an-oligarchy-expert-answers-our-questions/
As for what to do, this can be broken down into personal, communal, institutional/systemic.
Personal and communal responses will be creative and beautiful, as usual, but will be blocked by the institutional and systemic aspects – specifically media, corporations, governments, police, military, as usual for literally any kind of progressive initiative whatsoever, not necessarily limited to climate change. Witness the clampdown on Occupy.
So the hard question becomes what to do about the brick wall that is corporations, government, the police, military, which systematically stands in the way of any kind of progress.
At some point the impacts would be so blatantly obvious and undeniable that people will understand the need to stop flying, likely the biggest personal impact a person can have is to do your part to help crater the airline and travel industries by simply not traveling. Every time a commercial plane lifts off, it uses 2 tonnes of fuel just to get to cruising altitude, not to mention how much of that is converted to pollution. If you live anywhere near an airport you can smell how much pollution is created. If there were a way to dye the exhaust we’d probably have permanent near-zero visibility…
And this in turn shows us one way to tackle the institutional/systemic aspect. No corporation or government is going to force people to travel. Likewise, no government can force people to buy fossil-driven cars. There comes a point where the purchase of something becomes simply not worth the damage it incurs. The problem of course is the understanding too late what is needed.
Trump would order airlines to fly around empty, and get a golden share in each airline for his trouble.
Humans’ meat-based diet is a bigger contributor to global warming and forest devastation than air travel. Are we vegetarians yet?
The Global North humans’ industrial CAFO-dependent meat-based diet is the problem, not the animals.
Yes, but they would only fly around Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York and Chicago. They would also be required to fly under 3,000 ft.
Another way to reduce the amount of commercial jets being flown around would be to refuse to buy any fruits, vegetables, cut-flowers, etc. that had to travel by airplane, either “in” or “out” of season.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we fry!
It’s kind of amusing that tackling COVID, by mitigating airborne spread, is a substantially easier lift than dealing with Climate. For the former, the capitalist system of extraction itself doesn’t need to substantially change. For the latter, the whole game has to change. So we can see how “unsolvable” even a comparatively easy crisis is.
What a stupid timeline.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
– Mark Fisher (and Fredric Jameson)
At times I vacillate between thinking Fisher was too much of a doomer and thinking he wasn’t enough of a doomer. On one hand Capitalist Realism clearly had a sense of pure despair about it, a sort of “was Fukuyama right about the end of history?” spirit which I think wasn’t really warranted; on the other hand, he was pretty much on the nose about the concrete diagnosis of our predicament as regards ecology, culture and the like. Wish he was still around, though.
In Camus’s The Rebel. “Capitalism is about having more in order to have more.” That being the case, why ever would one stop accumulating no matter the cost.
“Capitalism is irresponsibility organized into a system.”
Emil Brunner, 20th century Swiss Reformed theologian
As long as Capitalism is the condition of possibility for our dreams, goals and desires WE will never do anything to change it.
Perhaps, at the individual level one could consider choosing not to eat meat and dairy, and to minimize recreational air travel. Whether it would make a difference? Possibly not, too much may be already “baked in”. Stay aware!
Many people– if not most– eat what they can afford, and not what they would eat if they were able to afford it… even in the “First World.”
[This Making Shit Up comment which violated our written site Policies was mistakenly approved. This, as one expert reader called him “pathetic little troll,” has been banned. Thanks to the readers below who took him on before we realized his comment had impermissibly gotten through]
[citation needed]. But I’ll bite. How does forcing rich people out of their private jets and yachts and promoting mass transit, energy efficiency, energy conservation, etc. a scam? Any serious solution should fall hardest on the rich, i.e. not that different from what they imagine as class warfare. So, the conclusion here is that denial of anthropocentric global warming is the scam in service to the rich.
The rest is nonsense, as on a geological scale, we’re all dead.
If we were trilobites, you might have a point. Human civilization arose in the stable Holocene which has allowed agriculture to flourish. There were no humans growing corn and wheat when Earth’s temperature was undergoing dramatic shifts. Thanks to our spewing ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, we are leaving the gentle Holocene behind as we enter the Spodocene. Hope your grandchildren have good hunter-gatherer skills.
Our grandchildren will have bigger issues dealing with the coming communist regime unfortunately.
How will anyone’s grandchildren be able to hunt and gather when there is nothing left to hunt and nothing left to gather?
No need to use geological deep time. A thousand years will suffice. It’s the slope of the trend on the right and the extreme sensitivity of global temperatures to small absolute but large relative changes in the composition of the atmosphere. It’s not the “cow facts and the car exhaust.” Rather it’s the release over a few hundred years much of the carbon that has been sequestered over a few hundred million years. Those zeroes (six of them) to the left of the decimal always cause a problem, except in the PowerBall or MegaMillions. And yes, climate does change irregardless of human activity, as the animals of the five great extinctions up through the Cretaceous-Paleogene could tell us, if they could talk (before they ate us) and we had a time machine.
considering the derivative calculus of CC on the accelerated decay of trees……
living amongst them, and witnessing their truncated demise….via drought and disease….
the wood-boring insects are feasting on our diminished futures.
The unfortunate thing with exponential functions is that the greater the value the greater the increase. i.e., the rate of acceleration always increases (calculus sure is depressing sometimes). I imagine the closest match to our predicament is an S-curve, and once we have economic collapse in at least some parts of the world then the rate of acceleration should diminish. Too bad the brakes to global warming don’t currently seem to be collective action, just collective collapse. Can something be done?
Here in the SF bay area there is a direct correlation of the charts in this article and the local weather changing.
Prior to the winter of 2014 I was assured of around 65 degree temperatures year round, and a cycle of 3 days fog, 3 days sunny, with temperature variations of 10 to 15 degrees in either direction for the few warm weeks and for the few cold weeks. I only needed to close my windows for maybe a week out of the year because it was a bit chilly.
Then the winter of 2014 it was sunny and beautiful and it did not rain. Since that winter, we have had temperature spikes of 100+, and winters with months of 50 degrees for a high and low 40s for a low. I now close my windows for 3 to 4 months of the year during winter, and I often never need to carry a warm layer in summer because the fog is no longer as present as it used to be.
It is warm at night. Temperatures spike in either direction, deluge, drought and wildfire, nothing is the same at all. I called it Global Weirding – when I mentioned the term to a climatologist who was visiting from Hawaii for a conference, he liked it. I then noticed the term on the webs, but it quickly went out of use. sigh.
I favor Climate Chaos, but Global Weirding has great resonance and says much the same thing.
Appreciate the article, especially the ending since it aligns with my approach to life now that I’m towards the end.
On a technical note, not sure why the person who made the graphs insists on using linear fit. When you see a linear fit with an increasing slope over time, maybe consider a different fit function.
Elliot Jacobson often uses an exponential fit for data that looks like this.
Thank you TN, particularly that last part. This is looking like a tough year.
I admire Hansen, but the academic blinders he often sports, goodness. Whatever we can learn from the incoming El Niño we will learn the hard way, and millions will likely suffer.
What impact does all of the billionaires, religions etc have on combating global heating?
Well, “orthodox Christian” Peter Thiel is big on Greta Thunberg being a hot candidate for position of AntiChrist because she is fighting for action on our ever heating climate.
The Zionist Christians think that when the apocalypse comes, they will have golden tickets as the true Christians to heaven with Jesus and everyone else will burn. – “It’s the worst kind of anti-Semitism,” says the cleric, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the issue. “At the end, these Evangelicals say that all the Jews will be dead except those who become Christians. But in the meantime, the Israelis are happy to fill their hotels with them and use their help to get American weapons.” https://time.com/archive/6943035/an-evangelical-at-armageddon/ and https://johnmenadue.com/post/2023/11/scott-morrisons-heartless-yearning-for-armageddon/
The fundamentalist Jews think that when the apocalypse comes they will have golden tickets as the true Jews to heaven with God, and everyone else will burn. And they are slaughtering red cows or planning to, with hopes of bringing on armageddon.
And we ordinary people wonder why the world is going to hell and nobody with money or influence is doing much about it?
The world is run by psychopathic nutters is the short answer I suppose.
Thanks for focussing attention on this latest development. Hugely important information allowing us to put many other things into proper context.
Agree to RIck, but I think it is common with warming predictions to just use linear fits. Don’t know why, maybe if you just isolate it to CO2 forcing it is usually linear, but we have Feedbacks and increase CO2 at the same time: it then appears to behave de facto more exponential???
Anyways, We truly live in an age of exponential functions. When you see a technical system exhibiting exponential behaviour you are shutting it down because it is about to blow up in your face. Similarly, biological systems with this kind of behaviour are likely to collapse and exhibit sudden state change. Any new stable state might not be stable for long. And any new stable state might not support the same species as any previous. Absolute change is a factor but rate of change might be a bigger factor when it comes to adaptation. A grade of knowledge does not correlate well with a grade of behavioural adaption. Historians are depressing people. A doctor might say if you cannot heal, try at least to minimise the harm you are doing.
“Climate change” and “global warming” no longer accurately describe this rapidly accelerating human sabotage of life-enabling global homeostasis. We now need more accurate and dramatic descriptions of this suicidal dynamic. I propose “planetary heating”. What are your suggestions?
Climate chaos?
Climate d’chaos decay?
Climate Crises is what I’ve trained myself to use, despite itself becoming weaker and weaker tea in conversation.
In my experience, a vast majority of people hold the Climate Crises low in their priorities for a variety of reasons from learned helplessness to that term “climate change fatigue”.
Within my circles I’ve realized that, more and more, I am the one constantly talking about it.
I’m also one of the few still gardening and care taking acreage.
Thank you Yves for keeping your shoulder on the wheel…
I think that it’s important to define what it means to “live your life well regardless of circumstance.” Until July of 2019 Jeffrey Epsteinn would have vigorously argued that he was able to “live his life well” even though that involved transactionally exploiting every single person with whom he came into contact for his personal pleasure and enrichment. Yes, “living well” includes material comforts, but the explosion in American billionaires from 66 in 1990 to over 900 in 2025 allows a few oligarchs to live in obscene sumptuousness.
We must begin with the assumption that the climate crisis is a direct result of a planetary carrying capacity crisis caused by the explosion of human lives in simultaneous being from 2.5 billion when I was born in the mid-1950’s to 8.25 billion today and 9 billion by 2035. This is not simply down to the “wrong” people having “too many children” — more children are surviving infancy and more of us are living much longer than the life expectancy 70 years ago. Is the “solution” euthanizing old people and more Gazas? I find both options morally repugnant (and a threat to my personal safety).
I propose the revival of an old definition of “living well” — Don’t do to others that which would be repugnant if done to you. The climate crisis is real and no person, rich or poor, will ultimately evade the consequences. Let’s all try to make the end as painless as it can be, for as many of our fellow human beings as possible.
There are things that could be done technically-speaking to lower the rate of carbon skyflooding. One such thing was laid out in an article on the website called Low-Tech Magazine.
” The Age of Speed: How to Reduce Global Fuel Consumption by 75 Percent
If we cut the average speed of all vehicles by half, fuel consumption would decrease by a whopping 75 percent.
September 11, 2008
Written by Kris De Decker ”
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/09/the-age-of-speed-how-to-reduce-global-fuel-consumption-by-75-percent/
I don’t know how politically do-able this would be given the current state of our society, politics and etc.
But it is certainly technically feasible even without any actual technological change-arounds or rebuilding and replacing of transport technologies.
That article compares the speed at 160 km/h (99.41 mph) to 80 km/h (49.7mph). Any one driving at 100mph in the UK is looking at an instant ban even on motorways. I drive at 55mph while everyone else drives at 75mph and get a 10% saving in fuel.
If fuel costed $10 a gallon, then more people would be incentivized to ” Drive 55″ I wonder if a serious political party would get anyway running on ( among other things) a 50 cent tax increase per gallon on gas and diesel . . . going up by 50 cents every year till it reached about $6-10 or so per gallon. Spread it out over the years to give the car industry time to make cars people could afford to drive at $10 a gallon for gas. Use the tax money raised to restore some of our missing mass transit.
And make it rider-inviting.
The same general principle could be applied in whatever form of money to whatever unit of measure in any country.
imho, there is no deeper and more sorrowful regret than that of opportunity lost or squandered.
Too many simple patches on the way to a fix.
And you’re not even talking about burning Capitalism down, as I would want.
Well, at the current rate of events, Capitalism will burn the world down before anyone can organize to burn Capitalism down while the world is still up.
Perhaps enough simple patches applied on the way to an actual fix would buy the Burn Capitalism Down community enough time to organize a Burn Capitalism Down movement actually able to burn Capitalism down while there is still a world in existence not yet burned.
So in that spirit, I again offer the suggestion to which that article up above pointed and detailed-out.
Run every transportation mode-of-conveyance just below its ” speed of hitting the air-wall” and save that 75% of liquid fuel thereby not burned. Build out some user-inviting mass transit and run even fewer modes of conveyance. etc. etc.